Back in the Game: "Pilot"Review

ABC's latest attempt to tinker with their Wednesday night comedy lineup - having never truly been able to take advantage of perennial Emmy darling Modern Family as an anchor - is Back in the Game, from Cop Out writers Mark and Robb Cullen. It's not bad to the point of being offensive, but it is insulting in its flagrant mediocrity. Meaning, why do this at all? Why spend tons of money making something that's so so egregiously flat, derivative and uninspiring?

And by the way - giving you all a heads up - this will be the easy, ongoing question throughout this new fall season as far as the new comedies are concerned. We started to see it this past spring with turds like Family Tools and Save Me, but we're getting close to an actual tipping point now. The death throes of the single-camera sitcom. Where something that was once a platform for absurdist brilliance is now a platter for fetid garbage. Fast-talking banter in place of humor. Safe, non-sequiturs in place of jokes. And, most of all, the desire to spice up network fare by adding - Mad Libs-style - unfunny (approved) words for penis like "junk" and "johnson."

Back in the Game is all of that and more. Not only does it not bring the laughs in all the aforementioned ways, but it's desperately formulaic. It's "woman whose life is in shambles" meets "person who has to live with their crazy parent" meets "Bad News Bears/Island of Misfit Toys." At least Work It's Ben Koldyke is on board, still wonderfully portraying "guy who treats women like s***."

Psych's Maggie Lawson stars as Terry, a former All-Star softball player whose life has, somehow, come totally unravelled. She's supposedly lost everything in a divorce, despite the fact that her husband was the one who cheated, which means she's now forced to live with her father - a man who likes to be referred to as "The Cannon" (James Caan, loudly nose-breathing and making throaty sounds) - who cartoonishly treats everyone around him like they're human excrement. And it turns out that the only thing more present than the damage Terry's father has caused her psychologically is Terry explaining to everyone the damage that he's caused her psychologically.

Anyhow, she's going to wind up teaching him a thing or two about kindness while some of his non-nonsense aggro bulls*** will eventually rub off on her. They'll both learn along that way. And it's very apropos that this show is about revisiting the past because the jokes feel like they're from 1983. This is a series where guys give themselves nicknames like "The Cannon" and "The Sling" and laugh out loud at the thought of a woman coaching a baseball team. This is a show where the main chauvinist villain is named "Dick" so that when Terry wants to insult him all she has to do is say "Listen...Dick," and enunciate the name. THAT'S A JOKE! Someone put that on paper and said "I'm done here."

The other part of this show involves the ragtag misfit boys baseball team that Terry volunteers to coach out of spite after her son Danny (Griffin Gluck) doesn't make the real team. There's a School of Rock vibe that they're clearly gong for here, but it doesn't quite work when the kids are non-sequitur spewing rejects. What they've done here is turn the kids into participants from some sort of SNL Bill Brasky sketch; complete with a montage of kids saying unfunny, weird things like "I once killed a wolf." What this does, see, is tell us that these kids haven't been rejected from their classmates for petty, superficial reasons. They've been rejected for very good, understandable reasons as their peers must think that (given the fact that they're all just writers room sounding boards) they're clinically insane.

I won't give away full details about the pilot episode here, but let me just add that there's one element in the father/daughter story that winds up eating its own tail. Terry has many gripes against "The Cannon," but one big one involves - vaguely - "You said you'd do this thing and you never did it!" And yes, predictably, Terry discovers that he did do that thing, but never told her. And this somehow warms her heart when it should make her realize that he's an even bigger a-hole than previously designated.

The Verdict

Stale jokes and a recycled plot add up to zero RBIs. (Baseball Zinger!)